Inspirational Quotes on Books

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”

“Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

“I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro. ”

“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”

“The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.”

“Literature is my Utopia”

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

“I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.”

“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.”